Voyager

by Russell Banks

  After visiting the American and British Virgins, Sint Maarten and St. Martin and Anguilla and Saba, it was a visual surprise to arrive at St. Bart’s and realize that almost everyone was white—the tourists, of course, and the large number of island entrepreneurs, but also the natives, who were mostly descendants of the original Norman and Breton settlers and had traditionally been small farmers instead of plantation owners. Plantation culture and its painful residue were as foreign to St. Bart’s as to St. Moritz, and the place felt a little like St. Moritz, though more laid-back, if that’s possible, and more expensive. In a sense, the entire island was a huge, chic French gated resort. There were many private villas in the hills, luxury hotels and bungalows along the coves and beaches of the north coast, and a picture-perfect yacht basin in the one town, Gustavia, a regular stop for the Lesser Antilles sailing crowd.

  Popular with entertainers hiding from their fans, models working on their tans, and a large number of balding businessmen in their sixties and seventies strolling the beaches alongside very attractive, much younger women in string bikinis, St. Bart’s provided little of interest for travelers like me and Chase, voyagers interested in the five-hundred-year clash-and-blend of diverse cultures, races, and classes that makes the Caribbean so exciting and so threatening. St. Bart’s was lotusland. But even the most intrepid of travelers can use a break now and then, so we settled into a cabana at Baie de St. Jean for a few days and tried not to be too distracted by the perfect beaches, the cuisine, the designer boutiques, and the discos. And—no surprise—we slumbered our days and nights away as if on holiday in St. Moritz, thousands of miles from the Caribbean, and I spoke almost not at all about my marriages and divorces. And it was painful to leave.

  Our itinerary and booked flights, however, obliged us to head next for Antigua. After reading native daughter Jamaica Kincaid’s book A Small Place, one might think, as one approached Antigua for the first time, that one was entering the third circle of hell. And, indeed, there was much about the island to offend the sensitive visitor and perhaps even more to offend a native Antiguan like Kincaid, who left her idyllic island home and returned twenty years later to find a country on the make and the local politicians on the take. Antigua is the largest of the Leewards, 108 square miles, seventy-six thousand people. It is also the most entangled in the history of British imperial ambitions. The economics and culture of sugar and slavery shaped its destiny to a degree matched only in Barbados and Jamaica. As a general rule, these are the islands most tragically caught in the subtly interwoven conflicts between hatred and slavish adoration of the mother country, between third-world nationalism and hopeless dependence on foreign loans, between profound affection for their island’s natural resources and relentless determination to develop, at all costs, the tourist industry. Antigua was an island at war with itself, and it showed.

  But if all we saw of the island were the congested, filthy streets of St. John’s, the capital, and its deepwater port, where the cruise ships touched down, and the recklessly developed north coast along Dickinson Bay to the airport, where the jumbo jets disgorged troops of tourists from the mainland, we would have concluded that, just as on St. Thomas and Sint Maarten, the island’s war with itself had been won by the darker forces. A drive across the island to Nelson’s Dockyard and the famed English Harbour would have only reinforced that view, for the elaborate restorations and reconstructions painted the history of colonialism and slavery in what can only be called a sanitized, benign, almost nostalgic light. And if we had followed the handsome art deco signs posted all over the island pointing proudly to something called Carlisle Bay, all the way through the Shekerley Mountains to the southeast coast, until we finally came to Old Road—where a two-hundred-year-old village of local farmers and fishermen was in the process of being removed and a vast mud hole was surrounded by a high chain-link fence with a rusting bulldozer in the middle—we would have smelled arrogance, greed, foreign capital, greased palms.

  Yet inland, away from St. John’s and over on the east coast, where large-scale tourism hadn’t yet taken over, the country was beautiful and clean, and the residents, mostly small farmers, were both proud and friendly. We could still find the Antigua mourned by Jamaica Kincaid, but we had to work at it, and it would not, could not, last much longer. Small guesthouses and owner-operated hotels, like the Long Bay on the east coast, where there were no social directors and no free drinks with cute names and paper parasols and we were free to talk and read, were rapidly being shouldered aside by the huge resorts, casinos, and condo complexes. All the good roads on the island now led only to where the air-conditioned tour buses wished to go.

  We made a day trip to Antigua’s country cousin, Barbuda, which had recently received its first attention from U.S. tourist publications, but the dry, low-lying platter of an island, located a few miles northeast of Antigua and part of the same political unit, offered little that had not been more interestingly, and prettily, offered by Saba. There were coral beaches here, however, and one (expensive) resort hotel, Coco Point Lodge. Barbuda was essentially a fishing and salt-producing island, isolated, sparsely populated, poor, with no scenic attractions, almost no tourist services, and a somewhat irritated local populace—irritated that Antigua, like a glamorous, gifted older sister, got all the attention and money and political power in what is supposed to be a two-island nation.

  We left Barbuda the following day and returned to Antigua, the transportation hub for the region, where we were to switch planes for St. Kitts–Nevis. Antigua’s huge V. C. Bird International Airport is named after Prime Minister Vere Bird, who had run Antigua and Barbuda like a fiefdom for the previous forty years. Built by the U.S. military in World War II, the airport was as large as the one the Cubans had built on Grenada, the airport that so famously alarmed President Reagan’s national security advisers. Steel bands played “Island in the Sun,” and grinning hostesses in Aunt Jemima costumes offered us free rum punch in plastic cups.

  The difference between Bird International on Antigua and the single short landing strip and rough one-room open-air terminal that greeted us on Nevis was extreme and captured the difference between the two islands. It wasn’t just size. It was character. Kincaid was right to be pissed off. We climbed out of the Winnair single-engine STOL plane that had carried us and three other passengers from Antigua, stretched our cramped legs, and instantly, because there wasn’t much else to do, admired the scenery—the glittering Caribbean Sea with emerald-green St. Kitts five miles in the distance, the palm-lined beach, the forested slopes leading quickly to the volcanic cone of Nevis Peak, 3,232 feet high, set smack in the center of the thirty-six-square-mile, circle-shaped island. A soft breeze blew, and except for the gentle clatter of palms at the edge of the field, all was quiet. This, we thought, might be the perfect Caribbean island. This is a North American’s idea of paradise.

  We were not alone in thinking that. A pair of white American teenaged boys in cutoff jeans, barefoot and shirtless, were hanging out at the airfield building—latter-day Huck Finns gone way south of south. They could have been me and Morelli in Amarillo thirty-some years earlier. One of them was explaining what a skateboard was to a puzzled local kid who was not sure what a skate was, while the other, red-haired and taller and seemingly in charge, tried in vain to make the pay phone on the wall work by every now and then giving it a slow whack with his open hand. “Dis t’ing vex me, mon!” the redheaded boy said in a sad, lame version of West Indian Rasta talk. “I-an’-I cyan’ mek de dam t’ing wok fe I-an’-I!” They couldn’t have been older than fifteen or sixteen, and in spite of their long hair, which had been forcibly knotted into pathetic imitations of Rastafarian dreadlocks, and their wispy blond mustaches and thin chin whiskers, they were still children. Their glazed, red-rimmed eyes and slow-motion gestures suggested more than occasional recreational use of cannabis.

  The half-dozen black taxi drivers in the terminal waited like pelicans on a pier for us to check our bags through the
one-man customs dock and politely ignored the American boys. We understood why. The boys were painful to look at. They had covered their skinny, sunburnt arms and legs and hairless chests and bellies with brightly colored tattoos of lions, portraits of Haile Selassie, Jamaican flags, dreadlocked Rastaman heads, marijuana leaves, and mottoes like JAH LIVES and ONE LOVE. They’d turned their slender pink bodies permanently into reggae record jackets. We winced and, like the taxi drivers, averted our eyes.

  Throughout our brief stay on Nevis and long after, the image of the tattooed, dreadlocked American boys stayed with me. We took a room in one of the many small guesthouses for which the island is famous, snorkeled off Pinney’s Beach, strolled the six or eight narrow streets of Charlestown, and visited the birthplace of Alexander Hamilton and the church where Lord Nelson and Frances Nisbet’s 1787 marriage certificate is kept. We did what you can do on Nevis—but I was unable to stop grieving over the boys and their absurd Rastafarian fantasy. I wondered if the occasional adult who saw me and my pal Morelli when we made our runaway drive across the continent in 1956 had averted his eyes and felt as sad and sorry for us as Chase and I felt for those lost boys on Nevis. The mythology that turned me and Morelli into teenaged car thieves chased by a nationwide all-points bulletin was the same one fictionalized the next year by Jack Kerouac in On the Road—the male romance of the West and the open road and the promise of ecstatic freedom from the conformist, repressive, suburban 1950s. Not to mention our deep unacknowledged desire, like Kerouac’s, to escape from our respective dysfunctional families—dysfunctional, a social condition that in the 1950s had no name. Like Kerouac, my and Morelli’s sacramental drug had been alcohol, not cannabis—rotgut jug wine we convinced drunks off the street to buy for us that we guzzled until we were throwing-up sick behind the stolen Olds 88 parked beside open-all-night roadside diners in Kansas City and Denver and in our grim, bare YMCA rooms in Amarillo and Pasadena.

  I wondered what myths had plucked the boys on Nevis from their suburban homes in the late 1980s and led them to fry their brains on ganja and cultivate their white-boy dreadlocks and tattoo their bodies, before finally dropping them off here in Nevis. In those days, all over the Caribbean, especially on the English-speaking islands, one encountered the occasional white Rasta, but it was usually an American woman, not a man or teenaged boy, in her twenties or early thirties wearing an ankle-length Ghanaian kente cloth wraparound skirt, her straight hair wrought into a matted version of the leonine dreadlocks worn by the handsome black Rastaman walking a short, but discernible, few steps in front of her. One naturally tended to view the woman’s relation to the man’s apparent Pan-African mysticism with a bit of skepticism, since her racial, political, and cultural experience was not only radically different from his, but was profoundly antagonistic to it. Rastafarianism is rooted in the black oppressed victim’s experience of the history of slavery and colonialism, in the African diaspora and Marcus Garvey’s Pan-Africanism, in the abject hopelessness of Caribbean ghetto poverty, and in the prophetic power of the “sufferers in Babylon” evoked by the image of the late emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, the Lion of Judah in full military regalia astride a white horse, and the music of Bob Marley.

  It is hard to understand how this autochthonous, mainly Caribbean mix of black suffering and imagery can make religious or historical sense of the world as experienced by middle-class white Americans. One tends to attribute the conversion of the Americans, if indeed they are converted, less to religion and history and sympathetic identification with the oppressed than to the Rastafarian use of cannabis as a sacrament and the seductive social rhetoric associated with reggae music—pacifistic, communal, and apocalyptic—and sex. And, of course, there is the fact that since the late 1960s all young white middle-class American men and women have known that nothing is more threatening to their parents than joining a black, ghetto-based, dope-smoking religious cult whose heroes are powerful, sexy black men with beards and weird hairdos who speak and sing an English patois no white American parent can understand. It’s the forbidden, eroticized.

  But the Rastafarian fantasy, and perhaps the permanent fog-inducing effects of ganja on still-unformed adolescent male brains, had taken the tattooed boys on Nevis beyond escape or rebellion. They could twist and roll their long blond and red Caucasian hair into rough, ropelike approximations of an African’s dreadlocks, but since they couldn’t turn their pink skin black, they had covered it instead with non-erasable graffiti, making it useful only as signage. Perhaps that was why they disturbed me so. The unconscious racial self-loathing and rage expressed by those tattooed young white bodies was my culture’s racism turned violently against itself. And possibly it was something closer to home, as it were, something more personal. Something to do with me and Christine and our time living in Jamaica in the 1970s and afterward, when our marriage came apart and she took a dreadlocked Jamaican lover and a few years later moved back to Jamaica and eventually married a different dreadlocked Jamaican man.

  When Chase and I visited the country, the government of St. Kitts–Nevis, led since 1984 by the People’s Action Movement and Prime Minister Kennedy Simmonds, was one of the most enlightened and stable governments in the Caribbean. The total population of the two-island nation was barely forty-five thousand, and the capital, Basseterre, on St. Kitts, had but fifteen thousand inhabitants. Tourism had been controlled, developed slowly and with careful regard for the environment, the cultural integrity of the populace, and the larger economic picture, which was mostly agricultural, with some small manufacturing and assembly plants developed by off-island companies. The largest employer was the government itself, which, in St. Kitts especially, was in the sugarcane business; but the laborers and farmers were organized, and although they were not exactly partners in the vast operation, they were protected to a degree unknown in the rest of the Caribbean.

  On the map, if Nevis, because of its shape, was a ball, then St. Kitts was a cricket bat. At least Kittians—cricket fanatics, like most West Indians—enjoyed thinking of it that way. The island is mountainous in the center, rising to 3,792 feet in the north at Mount Misery, dropping nearly to sea level along the bat handle, and rising again at the end. The coastal plains were given over mainly to growing sugar, and the only roads on the island looped along the coast around the fat part of the bat, passing through farming and fishing villages that seemed not to have changed in a hundred years. There were beaches at either end of the bat, and that is where you found most of the larger hotels—Frigate Bay, Jack Tar Village, Banana Bay Beach—where they could do the least damage to island life. This was rational tourist development, the kind of development that did not in the process destroy the product itself. In Basseterre and scattered throughout the island, there were numerous smaller hotels and inns, most notably the Ocean Terrace, and Rawlins Plantation, a tastefully renovated (not restored) old plantation house with eight guest rooms, set in a cane field at the foot of Mount Misery with expansive views of the sea.

  Here we settled for a few days, exploring the forested, mountainous backcountry by horseback, playing tennis on a grass court and croquet on the meticulously kept lawns, walking through spectacular gardens of hibiscus and bougainvillea, and sitting up late over cognac on the veranda, watching bats dart above the lawns while we talked of times past and times to come.

  This is the sort of experience that gave Caribbean tourism a good name in the first place and still generates most people’s fantasies of island travel. It’s what the tourist boards, airlines, hotels, and cruise lines advertise. But it’s a fantasy that has been too often clipped and cheated by reality, which is why so many visitors to the islands come home vaguely disappointed, feeling both gulled and gullible. Even so, the following winter the fantasists buy into it again. Because the reality that created and feeds the fantasy can still be found—at least in a few places out there it can—as we were discovering on St. Kitts, with variants available in some of the less-developed islands, like Saba and, as
we later learned, Dominica, St. Vincent, and Tobago—so people sign on for the trip again and again. To connect the reality to the fantasy, however, one has to be willing to invent one’s own private itinerary and avoid the crowds, as we were doing, and, of course, be able to finance it—since the only way to travel cheaply in the Caribbean then and now is in a packaged crowd, or else to count on the kindness of strangers and rough it. And risk having to make collect calls home for money on a pay phone that doesn’t work, like the tattooed boys on Nevis.

  The second day on St. Kitts we rented equipment for scuba at the Fisherman’s Wharf in Basseterre and learned basic diving in Banana Bay. Another day, we chartered a sailboat and crossed the seven-mile channel to St. Eustatius, one of the most lovely and least developed of the Dutch Antilles, for a day and a night. There we climbed through orchids to the Quill, an eighteen-hundred-foot-high extinct volcano, and later visited Fort Oranje, where the American flag got its first foreign salute in 1776. The following morning, we sailed back to St. Kitts and strolled along the narrow streets in and around Independence Square in Basseterre, where eighteenth-century Georgian houses had been renovated and turned into artists’ studios and boutiques. Later, we were back at Rawlins Plantation, sitting on the veranda, dressed for dinner, aperitifs in hand, for all the world looking and acting like Chase’s elegant globe-trotting grandparents in the 1920s and not at all like who we were, a middle-aged, middle-class pair of professors gone a-courting in the 1980s. Actually, Chase was only thirty-eight then; at forty-eight, I was middle-aged. We listened to the chortle of ground doves and the quiet click of sugarcane in the evening breeze as the sun set at the edge of a sky gone to gray velvet streaked with plum, the sea a flattened pink-and-cobalt plain. For a few hours we believed that we had never been this contented in our lives.